If you own a small business, then you likely have little time for anything that doesn’t revolve around dealing with vendors, tracking inventory, paying employees, and keeping your customers happy. You certainly don’t have time to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing. Heck, you barely have time to spare for your own marketing efforts! Yet, when you fail to account for the activities of your competitors, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start stealing your business out from under you. It simply doesn’t do to let your competition operate unchecked; if you don’t keep an eye on them you’ll never know when they’re undercutting you by offering discounts and deals in an effort to make you less attractive. That’s just one example of what they might do. As you can see, it’s important to stay vigilant. Unfortunately, the magnitude of this obligation doesn’t come with more hours in any given day to help you complete the task. So you’ll be glad to hear that there’s an iPhone app that can help.

Perch is free to download and you’ll quickly find that it’s a small business owner’s best friend. If you were even taking the time to monitor the online activities of your competitors before, you likely wasted a lot of time checking social media profiles and other marketing outlets to get a handle on what rival businesses were posting. Even if you subscribed to their feeds on Facebook, Twitter, and so on, you might not have had time to keep up with all of the content they were pushing on a daily basis. And while there are plenty of tracking and analytical programs online to do the work for you, the truth is that you still have to sift through the mounds of data they deliver in order to gain some useful knowledge concerning competitors. In short, it’s all too much for a busy business owner to manage.

Enter Perch, an application designed to do the heavy lifting for you. The main functionality of the app lies in the “watchlist” feature, by which you enter any businesses you’d like to keep an eye on. As a litmus test you could start by entering your own business. What you’ll find is that the app collects posts, not only from social networking profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare, for example, but also from hundreds of deal sites where you might offer discounts, coupon codes, and other types of online promotions. This should give you a good idea of what this app is capable of delivering when it comes to tracking rival businesses. Now all you have to do is enter the names of said competitors into your watchlist in order to follow their online activities. It’s as simple as that. And with email notifications you can find out immediately when updates occur.

Even if your efforts up to this point have been limited to looking across the street to see when competitors add custom-made neon signage, you don’t have to work too hard to start tracking them in the online arena. Thanks to Perch you can easily keep tabs on your competitors in order to see how they’re getting the customers that should be yours. When you see their online marketing strategies unfolding as you scroll through the entries on Perch, you can use the information to plan your own attacks and you’ll waste a lot less time in the process.